The Dual Personas of Social Media Bots

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian, Carley, Kathleen M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
author_facet Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
contents Social media bots are AI agents that participate in online conversations. Most studies focus on the general bot and the malicious nature of these agents. However, bots have many different personas, each specialized towards a specific behavioral or content trait. Neither are bots singularly bad, because they are used for both good and bad information dissemination. In this article, we introduce fifteen agent personas of social media bots. These personas have two main categories: Content-Based Bot Persona and Behavior-Based Bot Persona. We also form yardsticks of the good-bad duality of the bots, elaborating on metrics of good and bad bot agents. Our work puts forth a guideline to inform bot detection regulation, emphasizing that policies should focus on how these agents are employed, rather than collectively terming bot agents as bad.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Dual Personas of Social Media Bots
Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
Social media bots are AI agents that participate in online conversations. Most studies focus on the general bot and the malicious nature of these agents. However, bots have many different personas, each specialized towards a specific behavioral or content trait. Neither are bots singularly bad, because they are used for both good and bad information dissemination. In this article, we introduce fifteen agent personas of social media bots. These personas have two main categories: Content-Based Bot Persona and Behavior-Based Bot Persona. We also form yardsticks of the good-bad duality of the bots, elaborating on metrics of good and bad bot agents. Our work puts forth a guideline to inform bot detection regulation, emphasizing that policies should focus on how these agents are employed, rather than collectively terming bot agents as bad.
title The Dual Personas of Social Media Bots
topic Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12498